Comments

I think Ria was trying to establish if homo and the controlled use of fire leading to the domination of flora and fauna by 'Man' could be viewed as a hockey stick graph: with there being no appreciable impact for thousands of years with the impact then gradually becoming more and more noticeable? Controlled use of fire would have enabled homo to fend off large land predators and to move and live in colder climates along with cooking food making available more calories increasing brain size and increasing fertility. This being said, if controlled use of fire was used in major way by homo then surely there would be evidence of this in the anthropological/archaeological record? As far as I know, there is evidence of widespread use of controlled use of fire way back: just hearths here and there. I would be interested in a response from Ria and where will I be able to find Ria's critique of JZ as mentioned in JZ's show?

That's exactly my thinking. It reminds me of how sometimes a human plants a nonnative plant in their yard, and there's not one sign of regeneration for years and decades. But then it reaches some age, or some condition changes, or a bird poops out it's seed in some other place, and the nonnative plant's behavior bursts into an invasion and spreads across a region, or even a continent. In the beginning it looked so harmless, but then something sparked and bam!

I love JZ, pure intentions and he's so knowledgeable & well-versed on everything anprim, I agree with almost all his views, it's hard for me to flesh out disagreements with him. If I believed in pair bonding, his wife better watch out. jj

But I'm almost done writing the critique. It might go in a zine and/or my blog. Someone encouraged me to submit it to Anarchist Library. I could submit it to B&GR (wild resistance?) for them to reject again, it's too counter to their motif or not well written enough or whatever. Considering sending it to JZ first, but then we might get stuck in a rabbit hole going back & forth, or he might not have time & inclination to debate it.

If I didn't believe this made much of a difference in terms of action on the ground I wouldn't bother playing abstract language & thought games. But I believe it does matter.

As far as I know, there is evidence of widespread use of controlled use of fire way back: just hearths here and there. Typo error: it should have read 'As far as I know, there ISN'T evidence of widespread use of controlled fire way back...' Is there widespread evidence other than sporadic hearths?

Ria’s points cut to the core of anarchies-primitivism today. It’s likely that many people have turned away from it because of the patriarchal climate. John does a good job welcoming a variety of people, but the supremacy she cites cannot be ignored, except by them ignoring being called out.

"John does a good job welcoming a variety of people"
OOOoooh SURE!! I approached him and declared myself as a nihil-esque vegan Stirnerian and he derisively scoffed at me, IN FRONT OF a throng of vegan customers at a FASHIONABLE restaurant in Eugene, AND IN BROAD DAYLIGHT!!

I DOUBT IT!! He has the manners of an UNCOUTH NEANDERTHAL FISHMONGER! We bona fide nihil-esque Stirnerians will just keep to ourselves, we are not meant to socialize, ESPECIALLY WITH VEGAN PRIMITIVISTS!

Homo-nihilus is the only hope we have to divert the coming extinction, but of course, JZ will deny this, because he has it in his mind that homo-nihilus do not exist, or are only a negative psychological phenomena!

within the bowels of "Portland, Oregon" on the unceded lands of Turtle Island awakes the undying man-beast of the BLACK feral. The ground trembles, the winds rage as a dark, UNHINGED shadow emerges from the deep forest. A hissing war cry made of a thousand paulstretched crickets STORMS through the daily OVERCIVILIZED, mundane consensus reality of the Left and its milieu, freezing their blood, their coffee shops and their wifi suddenly engulfed in the DARK of its mighty outage. The WILD monkeywrencher then gazes at the city with untamed bloodthirsty glee, dagger held strong between its rotten teeth, the beast awaits the moonlight to raid the city and finally bring the Appelistas to their KNEES... once and for all!

I still have lots of editing & revising, but to answer most simplistically, I'd say the pre-colonizing Homo was foraging primate living within habitat ranges. The ethos of mutualism. But first there's a ton of damage to try to heal.

Along with controlling fire, hunting animals gave humans a predator colonizer ethos. And following the logic through, hunting led to oppression of women and other animals. Anprims will fight this fire with a blazing fire- can’t touch their hunting.

What you say makes sense. Ultimately we can’t go back and see how it all unfolded, so like you said, what concerns us is the implications it has for us now.
I think yours, along with others, is a solid argument for veganism as consonant with anti-civ anarchism, while decrying fire tech and hunting as civ.

But considering your hypothetical outcomes of the scenario of inter-group dynamics of those armed with fire-tech plus hunting-warrior prowess/specialization vs those who don’t, what do you propose?

In a conference i saw on youtube [citation needed] jc scott said that in reaction to civ there have been groups that, wanting to escape it, there were bands of ransackers that took from the people cultivating and sometimes that developed into a formalized protection racket that resembles mafia. In “Worshiping Power” there’s a portrayal if different lines along which there could have risen different proto-states or civs. What is your thought on these and how do they interact with your notions?

Gotta love JC Scott. Hey, extorting from cultivators sounds cool, maybe slow it down, make 'em reconsider? But as fun as that must have been, what were the outcomes in the end? I refuse to concede to the Parable of the Tribes, and might be hoping beyond hope that any of my actions is a seed that sets real root somehow, someway. The main thing I'm doing is strengthening wildlife's homes, no harm & might do some good, at least for a while. But I don't know if there's any way to totally escape the power paradigm, or even to any meaningful extent. What do you think?

Other than saying "i dunno", my first reflex thoughts are to think of the very unimaginative idioms some people say like "the cat is out of the box" or "pandora's box has been opened", in this case referring of our co-evolution with certain technologies or ethics, but i wouldn't settle for that. I think that a complete erasure of the memory of these is not necessary for people to reevaluate them, and their relationship to them, to change their culture/way of life/daily life for the better.

What i'm worried about in this instance is how to make these changes in a way that doesn't pose an opportunity for opportunists with a predatory mindset. I think someone could say something about security culture and safeguards and control, "securitization", but i'm not clear how that critique goes. A staunchly anti-authoritarian culture is necessary so that when increasing everyone's capacity (not a specialized subset) for attack/defense/evasion, it's not in any way channeled into anything resembling an army or a band that wishes to conquer.

I don't know where i read it, (i thought that it was in this article, but i checked and it wasn't, maybe i opened another one from your blog in a new tab, or had many tabs open), but something about robust ecosystems doing well warding off invasive species. I see how once we tend to an are through forest gardening or some other ways, it can eventually become very robust, but meanwhile our efforts at the starting phase are very vulnerable.

Have you read Ecotopia? Trying to figure out if/how that escapes the Parable of Tribes curse.

In addition to encroachment, fragmentation, exploitation, etc., one factor that's decimating wild places is the speed of the changes. Yeah nature adapts, but it takes time. Too many changes at fast speed is devastating. That's why instead of thinking in terms of helping nature with more changes, I try to assist in restoring how it's most recent healthier condition. Restoration Ecology baby!

What I love about The Howls of Deep Siberia is that this is just a regular person open & ready to figure it out, perhaps less weighed down in veils of culture hodgepodge.

Hey Ria, love your writing. I was just wondering, it doesn't mean anything to me about your abilities, but because it was brought up as a skill some people have, can you light a fire without any devices, just curious, thx.

I think you should bee writing way less about ideology, and way more about how someone like me who is interested in living in a nearby wilderness/forest, and is vegan, can survive out there, because you seem to be one of the few left who knows how. I asked you about this many types and have almost completely been ignored.

Doesn't know how to light a fire rubbing sticks together. THAT is the test if you've got the STUFF. And only 1 in 1000 can do that shit, sort out the real bona fide primitivists from the fakes.
Be interesting to know if the great JZ knows how to light a fire without devices. The Proverbial LITMUS TEST FOR REAL PRIMITIVISTS.

HAIL OUR KING OF THE PRIMITIVISTS, THE FIREMAKER, WHO SINGLE HANDED AND WITH STEALTH AND CUNNING SNEAKED INTO THE GOD OF FIRES LAIR AND STOLE THE ETERNAL EMBER WHICH IS EMBEDDED IN HIS SACRED HAND.
WE BOW DOWN TO YOU KING, WHO SAVES US FROM THE EVIL ICE DEVILS OF WINTER BLIZZARDS.

Unless you're like far deep into the wild lands and live like an actual primmie -and not some urban primmie poser- it can be pretty hard to just survive out of the wild nature while being vegan at the same time. I know several plans that are not just edible but very nutritious and kinda tasty, but you hardly can take so much as to be able to survive out of these. They'll be nice addition to a diet consisting of other things, tho. Thistles, wild carrots, great burdocks and plantain herbs are found all over the place and are sustainable food, and don't have to be eaten cooked.

If you wanna stay at the fringes of the city you'd better be going hybrid like some hobos do already. But craftier. Like have your shelter nearby an academic campus so there's a constant influx of young people to possibly fuck... maybe even friends to make and hang out with... internet to get porn and/or movies and/or games... great libraries for books... benefit from other amenities (showers, stealing/dumpstering food, etc)... troll teachers in academic classes... make yourself a Zerzan among the impressionable, well-off youngsters... ;0) Location... location... location!

I honestly don't know much about it because my foodway is mainly an urban decomposer. I do forage a bit, but there is soooo much civilization food waste here it's very easy to thrive. I also collect and hone knowledge and skills on foraging practices that assist and don't degrade forest health, but perhaps that's a luxury because I'm so well fed I don't have to focus on survival. I've considered writing a booklet on restoration ecology foraging, but when it comes down to it, I don't trust humans enough with this information, and I'm really just beginning to learn it.

If I were in your shoes, I think I'd study up big time on foraging like earliest humans, but I almost hesitate with that too. For example Cascara was once prevalent in my region, until humans moved in and began foraging the bark. And I've been to foraging trainings with very skilled people who are totally unaware of the ways some of the skills they spread about are harmful to the habitat. So that's really important to keep in mind.

Dissappointed with you Ria, I imagined you as a tough resourceful autonomous survivalist who could make fire without modern devicex, but no, just an urban desperado scavenging the refuse of civilization, still dependent on civ but at the same time decrying its failures. A tad hypocritical methinks,,,,,,,no?

So I just found out that Ria and other urban-based anprims are living off at least partly out of dumpstered foods and also use the Internet! They lost the ways of the ancient human troglodytes from a million years back, hence, IMPURE and not deserving to be living in the wild!

We nihilists always suspected this deception by anprims! We fervently gazed at their blatant flaunting of the civilized clothing and hardware they were dependent on, the cars and steel/rubber bicycles they rode on, the stainless steel fondue sets they cooked their industrial tofu on. SHAME ON YOU ALL *sobbing and wailing arises out of bamboo and banana leaf hut*

Good article. I can definitely see a link between the advent of fire mastery and further technology- leading as you say to differentials in power and setting the ground for a mindset of exploitation(which only grew more overt in expression over time).
Though I’m sure that the anti-vegan posturing you mentioned exists in part because of internalized narratives of hunting, the radical construction of living a life bounded as it was in the way of early humans, and to an extent as an expression of modern biases against veganism... I would say that some of the resistance must be related to the extreme difference from our current lifeway and the difficulty of returning to it. If you take the entire graduated spectrum from rampant consumer non anarchist to anarchist then from anarchist to anarcho primitivist and finally from the standard anarcho primitivist perspective to the early human vegan/opportunistic omnivore that you appear to advocate for...each step requires a massive shift, from one to the next, as regards ways of thought and daily life. As with most normies when seeing anarchist thought for the first time (or even the treatment anprims get from r/cth most of the time) the expected result is revulsion and outright rejection.
That being said - to bridge what you propose to where someone like myself stands(accepting the anprim critique, but seeing the most possible extreme way of realizing it as a return to an agrarian lifestyle using permaculture tecnics etc - a minimal primitivist praxis tbh)how would you propose we advance toward something even older. I’ve read fire cooked food contributed to the emergence of language for one thing(plant based included). And since most vegans I know rely on either industrial farmed produce or at best, locally grown stuff (which still is well outside of even the most modest indigenous forest gardening...which is further still outside of the prefire human), and we currently live bounded as we are by privatized lands - how should we proceed?
I ask this sincerely.im not yet vegan myself, but my wife at least is moving that direction from the experience of keeping our own livestock...for me it may be a longer road(currently focused on transitioning to being a locavore)...but I do want to find ways outside the monetary system to support my family and to do so in a way that is radically rooted and as non exploitative of the land I live on as possible.
If at any point in my long winded comment I seemed snarky or anything I apologize- I’m sleepy and had a long day - it was unintentional....I’m just curious and cursed with being long-winded.

The above was a response to my essay from elsewhere. Here's another response:

"Nice article. I think I more or less agree with you. Certainly I think that a focus on cooking/eating animals is a root-cause of oppressive/hierarchical behavior. Fire certainly played a role in that.

Overall, I tend to have mixed feelings on whether to critique indigenous lifeways that incorporate the use of fire in land "management". I'm not sure I believe that there would be purely egalitarian communities in the absence of fire. And I do think that many indigenous cultures who have utilized fire are/were so much more egalitarian than my own culture that I have to pause before I question their history.

Its a curious situation: if fire had never been harnessed, maybe we would never have seen the rise of colonizing cultures. But given the use of fire for millennia, some outcomes and cultures seemed much more desirable than others.

I also think its interesting that fire-prone ecosystems have co-evolved with anthropogenic fire over the past 10,000 or so years (since the last ice age). In terms of restoration, this presents a problem: do we restore to a condition that assumes no anthropogenic fire, or are indigenous cultures and their intentional fire-setting a characteristic mechanism of disturbance? I tend to go with the latter while quietly questioning whether we should be allowing the lofty characterization of our species as an ecological "keystone". "

To make amends to women, children and animals Wild Resistance should run Ria’s essay, with no defense but just questions to deepen their understanding and ways they can make amends. And do all the citation formatting. And ask her to be an editor. Or best yet, go to work in the forest repairing their harm. I’m almost serious.

Newbie here, I stumbled onto this show and to be honest I'ma bit of a political novice regarding the parties and the good community, being grown up by poor farming stock in the midwesr, things are fairly simple and straightforward, you respected people if they treated you well, and you helped your neighbour out.
Now what gets me riled up is this city-slicking JZ running down us farmers, saying we are the cause of civilization, and I'm no hoppy and do 't grow watermelons, but everything JZ wears, them chicy shirts and jackets made out of American cotton, How come he don't walk around in a banana leaf skirt and a cabbage leaf hut hey? Where's that tea and coffee lahtte his drinking come from, and the nice ceramic pot and stainless steelspoon, But ohh nooo HE stirs his tea wiff a stick he pulled off the hickory tree this morning AMIRITE?
And ALL that electric equipment he talks to interlectural friends who just run down like 99 % of the American people all except his gang of snobby chick fancy dressed people who leave a BIG carbon footprint but us poor farmers just wear old torn denim overalls huh and don't go on fancy holidays to see the booist larma and talk shit about all the sinners huh?
And who the hell are these vegans running down farmers but what, they get their vegetables from fancy organic hobby farmers and it costs 4 times more?

Leading on from the controlled use of fire (aka the release of compacted energy), there is now a global industrial infrastructure based on said controlled use of combustion: through coal, gas, oil, nuclear etc. Empires once used slaves as a form of additional energy: how many slaves would be needed to power global industry? People simply don't think of how much energy they actually use? People moan at the price of fuel without considering how much energy they are getting for their money? For example, a car in the UK will do 40 miles on a gallon of fuel at a steady pace of 50 mph: imagine how many slaves it would take to match the one gallon of fuel and the cost? This is complacency on a huge scale along with the billions of nonhumans who are slaughtered each and every year and the trillions of fishes/sea life, first suffer through a horrific existence and yet, some of us are adamant we are the most 'advanced' species to have ever lived!!! And now we have people with dicks calling themselves women and insist upon it!!! What The Fuck Next?

What next? People without brains calling themselces wise politicians. I actually don't care, because human vanity and power have been doing this since THE FUCKING APE-LIKE CREATURE fell out of the tree and stood up on 2 feet and got a SUPERIORITY COMPLEX.
I'm a nihil-esque doppelgangering rebel with Stirnerian/Riddickian backtalking attitude and a Wildeian non chalance and I say WE ARE ALL FUCKED!

Great piece Ria! Succinct yet comprehensive. As always, your writing sets the gears in my mind spinning. We can observe that traits identified with civilization can be found in sustainable primitive societies. Fire, hunting, hierarchy, etc. Toned down greatly, of course. I think most modern civilized people see this as a sign of inferiority in these groups rather than a sign of primitive people's understanding of the true nature of sustainability and a choice to live within what their landbase can provide. The South Seas expansion provides a good example. As people inhabited those islands, they began destroying the ecosystems. Some, like Easter Island, sealed their fate by cutting down the last tree. Others stopped what they were doing, seeing it would lead to their demise and changed their practices to live sustainably. I can imagine in both groups, someone explained what you explain in this article. Some of the island societies listened and survived (at least until European expansion). Others no doubt tossed the heretic to the sharks. Stay wild.